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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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Christian
communicators can find themselves caught between the church and the world as
they seek to use signs that appropriately resonate with God’s truth. The
difficulty lies in distinguishing between words and images borrowed from the
original context of God’s revelation in the Bible and those signs invented to
define God in later contexts. If Christians borrow signs from the world, can
they remain truthful followers of God? Christian t-shirts sometimes use slogans
from secular brands and twist their meaning to produce Christian messages.
Borrowing from the “Got Milk?” advertising campaign, a Christian t-shirt asks,
“Got Jesus?” Worship music that I hear in the chapel of the Christian
university where I teach uses the tune of the song Hotel California. A
Christian rock group changed the lyrics to fit the praise and worship scene.
Although appropriating recognizable secular-cultural artifacts can make
Christian tradition accessible to the newly initiated, at what point are Christian
commitments violated? Some might find that the hedonism described in Hotel
California makes the song inappropriate to use for Christian purposes, but
Christians have long practiced appropriation from non-Christian cultures.
Consider for a moment the doctrine of the Trinity. Downing points out that the
word “Trinity” never appears in the Bible. Not until the fourth-century Council
of Nicaea did it become a doctrinal sign to define the Triune nature of God. If
it is not in the Bible, how essential is this word to Christianity? And if
Christians seek to convert Muslims who see Trinitarian theology as sacrificing
the essential one-ness of God, then shouldn’t Christians be willing to
sacrifice non-Biblical aspects of theology to advance conversion?

Downing’s
book takes seriously these issues as she wrestles with, and provides persuasive
answers to, the question of how to act as a Christian communicator. Her account
offers a tour through modern and postmodern developments in the fields of
linguistics and critical theory that she believes can contribute to faithful
Christian advocacy as well as an academic study of communication from an
evangelical Christian perspective.

Downing
focuses on the historically “changing signs” that have helped to define
Christianity, noticing specifically how Christian signs in one moment may have
been secular in another. For a simple example: although December 25 marked a
pagan holiday at one historical moment, Christianity gave it new meaning in
another. The purpose of the Christian communicator involves using profane and
shifting signs on behalf of Christian truth that exceeds the surface level of
semiotics: “...Christians might influence the flow of culture by changing their
signs of truth. This does not mean it will call into question Christian truth
itself” (21).

To
describe the precariousness of choosing signs to claim for Christianity Downing
uses the metaphor of a US quarter standing on its edge. She describes
Christians as “on the edge of the coin” caught between the symbolic conventions
of history and the demands of the present. The coin captures convention through
the image of George Washington’s head, on one side of the coin, which has not
been changed since it was drawn by John Flanagan in 1932. On the other side, the
symbol of an eagle was replaced with images of states in 1999 as part of the
State Quarter Program. Christians should likewise sit on the edge, balancing
the truth they receive from the past with the need for relevant Christian
messaging in the present. In Downing’s terms, this is a problem of (re)signing:
“1. As Christians, we are resigned to essential truths revealed by God.
2. As communicators we recognize the need to re-sign those truths,
generating fresh signs that make ancient truths meaningful to contemporary
audiences” (22).

Downing’s
tour through semiotic theory hits the right theological notes as she evaluates
theory based on her Christian theological commitments. In probably her most
important theoretical move, she emphasizes Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics,
a threefold notion of the meaning making that humans experience in relationship
to signs: “representamen,” “object,” and “interpretant.” When coming across an
“object” in the world, humans make sense of the tangible thing as a “representamen,”
or sign. But some form of interpretive process is necessary to establish that
meaning. Peirce uses the term “interpretant” to describe people who might read
the same representamen differently. Take, for instance, the representamen
“Trinity.” The object under analysis is the nature of God. Depending on
what community you come from—Christian, on the one hand, or Muslim on the
other—the interpretant will be different. Whereas a Christian community will
most often see the Trinity as a legitimate sign of a singular God, a Muslim
community might see the same sign as a polytheistic, and therefore inaccurate,
account of God. The meaning of each sign thus depends on the community in which
it is ­interpreted.

Downing
embraces Peirce’s notion of signs and meaning as rooted in community. She
argues that on one side of the coin sits those who seek to shed “Trinity”
because it wasn’t included in scripture and, on the other, those who
inaccurately argue that the sign “Trinity” was used in scripture. She advocates
for Christians to sit on the edge of this coin, recognizing the Trinity as a
construct of human history, but nevertheless a valuable reflection of a
necessarily fallible human effort to define God’s truth.

Overall,
Downing’s key contribution is her unwillingness to differentiate between
serious engagement with the practices of Christian theology—like the question
of the Trinity—and theoretical approaches to sign reading. By treating
semiotics as a theological issue, while writing in a manner accessible to the newly
initiated, this book can offer Christian communities academic lessons as they
wrestle with questions of ­communication.